Back
in 2003 I had been pastor of Monroe Congregational Church, United Church of
Christ, in Monroe, Washington, for a little over a year. My wife recently found
a copy of an essay I had written back then that I have just reread. I don’t
remember writing it, but I must have because it sounds just like me and
expresses some of my deepest beliefs about the saving work of Jesus Christ. If
I do say so myself, and I will, it is a remarkably good piece of work. So I
have typed it up pretty much exactly as I wrote it back then with only a very
few minor editorial changes that in no way change the meaning of the text. The
original text contained no footnotes. I have added a few here to say somethings
I didn’t say in the original piece. I hope you will find this work as
meaningful as I do.
Solidarity
May 22, 2020
Summary
In
the time I have been with you here at Monroe Congregational United Church of
Christ several of you have asked me what it means when we say that Christ died
for us or for our sins or that he died to save sinners. At least one of you has
even asked me to write down my thoughts on the question. It is a most profound
and difficult one, difficult at least for those of us who find the traditional
answers to it unsatisfactory or outright unacceptable. I want here to give you
my thoughts on the subject with the hope that they may be helpful to you in
working through your own understandings of this central Christian issue.
I
know that many of you, understandably, will not want to slog your way through
all of the overly academic prose that follows. Therefore, here is a much
condensed summary of this paper. The most common understanding of what it means
when we say that Christ died for us or for our sins comes from a medieval
writer named Anselm of Canterbury and is called “The Classical Theory of
Atonement.” In the minds of most Americans it is virtually synonymous with
Christianity itself. It holds that human sin is so evil and pervasive and that
it is such an affront to God that God cannot simply forgive us for it. A price
has to be paid. The problem is that the most any human could pay would be to
give his or her life, and a human life is inadequate to pay the price. The
affront to God of human sin is simply too great for that. So God sent God’s Son
to become a man for the purpose of paying the price for us. God, in the Person
of God’s Son, paid the price that we could not pay ourselves. Once that price
was paid on the cross of Jesus, God could and did forgive us for our sin. Many
of us reject this theory primarily because we believe that it makes a monster
out of God. Many feminists call it “cosmic child abuse.”
My
own understanding of the question is this: God, or God’s Son, did indeed become
human in Jesus. Jesus did not come to die, but he remained faithful to God all
the way to the cross. In doing that Jesus demonstrated to us God’s solidarity
with us in all the aspects of our lives, even in our suffering and death. On
the cross God took human suffering and even death into God’s own person and
sanctified them. God proved to us that God enters into our suffering and our
death with us. In the Resurrection God showed us that God also leads us out of
suffering always into new life, whether in this life or beyond this life. In
this understanding Christ did not die to pay a price. Christ died to
demonstrate to us that God loves us and is with us in whatever befalls us. Now,
for those of you who are feeling masochistic, on to a more detailed
presentation of my thoughts on this important issue.
Introduction
The
position I outline here is based upon much reading and reflection, but to the
best of my knowledge it is not taken directly from any one writer. Authors to
whom I am indebted include Paul Tillich, Douglas John Hall, Marcus Borg, John
Shelby Spong, and John Dominic Crossan, among many others. I
also want to recognize The Rev. Dr. Michael Rashko of the Seattle University
School of Theology and Ministry from whom and in whose classes I learned much
of what follows.
I
fully recognize that my answer to why Jesus died for us is not “orthodox.” Some
of you may find it difficult or even unfaithful. If so, please reject it. I
believe, however, that it states a way of understanding the significance of the
death of Christ that has meaning for us today. I know at least that it has
profound meaning for me. My conclusion is that on the cross and in the
Resurrection of Jesus God demonstrated God’s ultimate solidarity with us in our
lives, in our deaths, and even beyond our deaths. I have experienced that
solidarity in my own life. I know that some of you have also. I pray that my
thoughts here may give those of you patient enough to read them a helpful way
to understand your experience and share it with others.
The Scriptural Background
Although
the Christian Scriptures do not reflect only one way of understanding the
saving significance of Christ’s death, there is no doubt that they attribute
profound significance to that death. I will give just a very few examples here.
In Mark’s Gospel Jesus’ death and resurrection are central to his identity and
mission: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great
suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and after three days arise again.” Mark 8:31. In the Gospel of
John dying is a large part of why the Word became flesh. There Jesus says, for
example: “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from
this hour [i.e., the coming crucifixion]?’ No, it is for this reason that I
have come to this hour.” John 12:27. In the book of Revelation Jesus is
presented as the sacrificial Lamb of God slaughtered for us. There, referring
to Christ seated on His heavenly throne, the heavenly multitudes sing: “Worthy
is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and
might and honor and glory and blessing.” Revelation 5:12. The allusion is to
the Hebrew tradition of the sacrificial lamb of the Passover, about which a bit
more below.
The Historical Background
There
seems to me to be no doubt that the earliest Christians had a profound,
life-changing experience that in Christ Jesus, and specifically in his
death and resurrection, they were saved. By saved I mean here, as I believe
they meant then, reconciled to God, that is, restored to right relationship
with God. In Christ they experienced a closeness to God and a living, loving
presence of God in their lives that they had not experienced before. That
experience, which borders on the mystical as those of us who have perceived
even a faint reflection of it know, preceded any attempt to explain it in
words. We must remember that all of the Christian Scriptures were written
between approximately twenty-five and eighty years after the death of Jesus.
There was therefore a significant period of time in which the Christian
tradition developed orally before anything was written down—at least
anything that survived and became part
of Christian Scripture. Thus, what we have in Christian Scripture is
reflections of the Christian community on their experience of the saving
significance of Jesus Christ. The experience came first, the writings came
later out of a need to record the experience, preserve it, and pass it on toe
future generations.
As
they searched for words with which to convey something of their experience the
early Christians found first of all the Hebrew imagery of the Passover lamb,
which was ritually slain as an expiation of sin. It is an image with which
every Jew and everyone familiar with Jewish customs of the time was very
familiar. It was the central image of atonement and of God’s forgiveness of sin
in first century Judaism. It is the early Christians’ use of this Jewish
imagery that, more than anything else, explains their language about the
atoning significance of Jesus’ death.
Traditional Theories of Salvation
The
Christian tradition has produced many different theologies of salvation (the
technical term for such a theology is a “soteriology”), that is, many different
theories of just how we are saved by the death, or the death and resurrection,
of Christ. I will (very briefly) discuss three of them here, the three that I
believe are historically the most significant. Each of them is based upon a
particular, and different, understanding of just what it is that we need to be
saved from. Put another way, they are each based upon a particular
understanding of what the human crisis or existential dilemma actually is. By
those terms I mean simply this: What is it that in the end keeps us awake at
night? What is our most profound spiritual fear or longing? What do we need
that we do not have in order to be in right relationship with God? Religions
all assume that we need something that we do not have in order to be in
right relationship with the Ultimate, however they understand the Ultimate. If
we didn’t we could get along very well without religion. Each of the
traditional theories of salvation assumes a particular understanding of the
human dilemma. In addition, each reflects the theological understandings of the
time and even the social and political structure of the society out of which it
came. The historical theories I will discuss here are the Christus Victor Theory,
the Classical Theory of Atonement, and the Demonstration Theory. I will then
share my own understanding, which I will call a Solidarity Theory.
The Christus Victor Theory
The
Christus Victor Theory is the oldest of the salvation theories. It is indeed
the principal one reflected in the Christian Scriptures. The existential
dilemma it addresses is the believe that we are held in bondage to sin by
Satan. To the early Christians Satan, in many ways more than God, was the
prince of the earthly realm. Paul, the author of the oldest of the Christian
Scriptures, expressed this idea repeatedly by saying that the “powers” have
dominion over earthly life. In the world of that time, a great many people were
in bondage or slavery to other people, and this social fact provided the model
for the Christus Victor Theory. People were freed from slavery when someone
“redeemed” them, that is, paid the person keeping them in bondage a price for
their freedom. Thus, the early Christians’ understanding of salvation was that
someone had to pay off Satan to release us from sin. The church’s earliest
understanding of how Christ saves us is just that. He paid the price not to God
but to Satan to release us from our bondage. We were redeemed from Satan when
Christ paid the redemption price. This understanding, which in one modified
form or another has had more modern proponents, is called the Christus victor
(Christ Victorious) Theory because in His death—and in the Resurrection, which
plays a significant role here—Christ was victorious over Satan and all of
Satan’s ways, including sin and death.
To
me, the Christus Victor Theory ultimately does not work. Certainly in the
Resurrection Christ was victorious over death and sin (the human sin that
caused people (not God) to nail Him to a cross). The problem with this Theory,
however, is (for me at least) that it gives too much power to Satan. Now, I
understand the name “Satan” not literally as a person active in the world by as
a mythic expression of the reality of evil. But whether we understand Satan to
be a fallen angel who rules Hell and is constantly tempting us with sin or as a
metaphor for the reality of evil, the Christus Victor Theory virtually makes
Satan the equal of God. Satan becomes in this Theory a countervailing force to
God, something evil but nonetheless affirmatively existing and batting on
essentially equal terms with God for control of the world and of our souls.
Indeed, as some people speak of Satan in the world, he virtually becomes
stronger than God or at least a rival god to God. I reject that view of the
nature of reality. I do not see evil as having an affirmative reality separate
from God and opposed to God. I see it rather as something purely negative. It
is not a kind of being. It is the absence of being as God intends it. It has
power, indeed very great power, but it does not have what the philosophers
would call independent ontological status. That means that it is not something
existing separate and apart from God that stands in opposition to God. It is
not a rival god to God. In the Judeo-Christian understanding of reality, there
is only one God. The Christus Victor Theory seems to be to be heavily
influenced by the dualistic religion of Babylon, in which a good god and an
evil god battle continually for control of creation. That is not the true
Christian view. I reject the notion that God had to pay a price to Satan for
our salvation because that notion simply gives too much power to Satan.
The Classical Theory of Atonement
There
is a second understanding of the saving value of Christ’s death that is so
pervasive among the conservative varieties of Christianity that have come to
dominate the popular awareness today that for most Americans, indeed for most
American Christians, it has become virtually synonymous with Christianity
itself. This understanding comes not directly from Scripture but from a book
called Cur Deus Homo, Why God Became Man, published in 1109 by an
English monk named Anselm of Canterbury.
(1109 sounds like a long time ago, but keep in mind that it is closer in time
to us than it is to Jesus.) In this theory, known as the Classical Theory of
Atonement but which also goes by the four bit name “the substitutionary
sacrificial atonement theory,” the human crisis that we all face is that we
live in sin, and our sin destroys our relationship with God so thoroughly that
unless something is done to restore the relationship we are all condemned to
spend eternity in Hell suffering unspeakable torments. Thus, the theory has its
roots in an understanding of the fundamentally disordered relationship between
God and humans that sin creates.
Anselm
lived in the time of feudalism, and his view of relationships was feudal. In
the feudal society of his time the model of the divine-human relationship was
the earthly relationship of a lord to a vassal or servant. In that relationship
the vassal owed a duty of loyalty and service to the feudal lord, and the lord
had a duty to protect the servant from enemies. The entire social structure of
the time rested upon this type of superior to inferior relationship. Sometimes
this relationship would be disrupted by some violation by the vassal of his
duty of loyalty and service to the lord. When this happened, the lord’s honor
was damaged. The disloyalty of the servant shamed the lord as well as the
servant. The lord could not simply forgive the servant, overlook the breach of
duty, and restore the relationship. Before the lord could to that, a price had
to be paid. The vassal had to pay a penalty the purpose of which was in part to
punish the vassal but which was intended primarily to restore the honor of the
lord. The nature of the penalty depended on and corresponded to the nature and
extent of the breach by the vassal.
Anselm
applied this system of human relationship to the relationship between God and
humans. God is the Lord, understood here in a medieval, feudal sense. Humans
owed God a duty of loyalty and service, and that meant primarily refraining
from sin. God then assured us of eternal protection in the form of eternal
salvation. When we sin, we violate our duty of loyalty and service to God, and
God’s honor is damaged by our sin just as a feudal lord’s honor was damaged by
a breach of duty by a vassal. And just as the feudal lord could not simply
forgive a vassal’s breach of duty, so God cannot simply forgive sin. We must
pay a price, suffer some penalty, before our sin can be forgiven and the proper
relationship between God and humanity can be restored.
However
at this point we run into a profound problem. Recall that the penalty or price
had to correspond to the nature and extent of the violation. Anselm was
convinced that our sin is so deep, so evil, and so pervasive, that it is such
an unspeakable affront to God, that nothing we could do could possibly pay that
price. Put another way, God is so far above and beyond us that nothing human
could possibly be enough to restore the Divine honor that has been so horribly
besmirched by our sin. According to this theory, if God were t leave us to our
own devices there would be no way out. God would have no choice but to damn us
all because we are incapable ourselves of paying the necessary price for our
sin.
That,
according to Anselm, is why God became a man. God became human in Jesus to pay
that price for us. The most any human could give would be his or her life, and
no human life was enough of a price. Only the life of God’s own Son could be
enough to pay the price for human sin and could restore God’s honor and our
relationship with God. So according to Anselm, God became human for the purpose
of suffering and dying as the price of human sin. The Classical Theory of
Atonement is so pervasive in contemporary Christianity that most of us assume
that it is biblical. It isn’t. Nonetheless we all read the Bible through lenses
shaped by the Classical Theory of Atonement.
I
find the Classical Theory of Atonement to be profoundly unsatisfactory. I
cannot accept its feudal assumptions about the nature of the Divine-human
relationship, and I am convinced that it paints a horrific picture of God. As I
noted in the Summary above, some feminist theologians call this theory, with
good reason I believe, “cosmic child abuse.” I once saw a television evangelist
get up in front of an audience with in infant in his arms, a child not more
than a few months old. He stretched out the child’s arm and turned the palm of
her hand toward the people. He asked: “Who among you could find it in your
heart to drive a nail through this little hand?” The people quite properly
gasped in horror at the thought. Then the preacher said: “Yet God loves us so
much that that is exactly what He did. He crucified his Son to save us. He
nailed His Son to a cross for us.” (For people of this theological persuasion,
but not for me, God is always He, which is why I have used that pronoun here
but not elsewhere in this piece.) The Classical Theory of Atonement indeed
convicts God of cosmic child abuse. What sort of God would require the
infliction of that kind of suffering and death on anyone, let alone on God’s
own Son, before forgiving us for sin for which the person punished was in no
way responsible? To be blunt, such a God is a monster. The Classical Theory of
Atonement is in the end simply irreconcilable with the God of love and
compassion that we know in Jesus Christ.
The Demonstration Theory
Somewhat
later in the same century in which Anselm published Cur Deus Homo,
another medieval Scholastic writer, Peter Abelard, proposed another way of
understanding the saving work of Christ. His view of the matter is called the “Demonstration
Theory,” for reasons that will soon become apparent. I do not find it entirely
satisfactory for reasons I will address below. Nonetheless, I find it more
satisfactory than either the Classical Theory of Atonement or the Christus
Victor Theory. I believe that it provides at least a starting point for an
understanding that is meaningful to us today.
This
theory assumes, it seems, that the human crisis is that we are not aware of how
much God loves us. It seems to me to reflect the growing interest in human
knowledge that characterized European culture in the twelfth century. Abelard
proposed that in the crucifixion God demonstrated God’s love for us in
order to make up that gap in our knowledge. This demonstration of God’s love is
available to all who would appropriate it into their lives. It provides a model
by which we may try to live our lives, a model of self-giving service to
humanity. By dying on the cross for us, Jesus displayed the full measure of
love. He did not decline horrible pain, and he subjected himself even to death,
to show the extent of God’s love for us.
Now,
as I said, I do not find this Theory entirely satisfactory. It avoids most of
the problems of the Classical Theory of Atonement and the Christus Victor
Theory, but Abelard never quite explained just how the crucifixion demonstrates
God’s love for us. His version of the Demonstration Theory also leaves the
saving effect of Christ’s sacrifice up to us. We can respond to it or not as we
see fit. The saving effect comes as much from our side as it does from God’s
side. That part of the theory goes against our Calvinist roots in the UCC,
which hold that our salvation is a free gift of God that does not require any
work of ours. So, while in many ways I use Abelard’s Demonstration Theory as a
starting point in my own understanding of the saving work of Christ, I do not
stop there.
My Solidarity Theory
We
start, as did the historical theories discussed above, with an understanding of
our existential dilemma. I
do not believe that our existential dilemma, our human crisis, is the same as
that which gave rise to either the Christus Victor Theory or the Classical
Theory of Atonement. It is somewhat similar to the understanding behind the
Demonstration Theory but is not identical to it. We do not feel enslaved by the
devil, from whom our freedom must be purchased as in the Christus Victor Theory.
Most of us in mainline churches, while (I hope) aware that we “all fall short
of the glory of God,” to use Paul’s words, do not feel ourselves so profoundly
sinful that only the death of the Son of God could atone for our sin, as the
Classical Theory of Atonement claims. Our existential dilemma is more profound
and complex than a mere lack of knowledge, as in the Demonstration Theory.
Rather, I believe that our existential dilemma is essentially one of
alienation.
Many
contemporary commentators have analyzed the modern existential crisis as a
threefold alienation. At a profound level we moderns tend to feel alienated
from God, from each other, and from our true selves. To be alienated from
something means to be foreign to it, that is, to be separated from it in a way
that prevents (or at least hinders) communication, community, and communion. We
do not know that from which we are alienated as an intimate part of our lives,
of our selves. In the case of the modern alienation from God, others, and self
we feel a deep loss because of the alienation. Because of our perceived
alienation from God, which I believe arises primarily because we do not know
what to make of death, we live with an existential angst, a nagging fear about
our place in the universe and our ultimate fate in it. Because we feel
alienated from God, the ultimate ground and source of our being, we feel
grounded in nothing, subject to all the capricious whims of fate. We have no
anchor. Because we are alienated from God as the ground and source of all
meaning we agonize over the meaning of life and at the most profound level are
unable to find any. Because we feel alienated from each other we feel
profoundly lonely, like a ship alone on a vast sea with nothing but emptiness
around us as far as we can see in every direction. Because we feel alienated
from our true selves we do not know who we are. We search for meaningful
identity and cannot find it anywhere. The emotional, spiritual, and even social
consequences of our threefold alienation are devastating. Many of the ills of
the world are, in the end, traceable, I believe, directly to our alienation
from God. If we can overcome our alienation from God we will be able to
overcome our alienation from others and self as well.
The
saving work of Christ is, for me, to show us that we in fact are not alienated
from God and hence need not be alienated from each other or from our true
selves. When we say that Christ died for us, I understand that to mean that on
the cross of Jesus God demonstrated God’s ultimate solidarity with us. God’s love for us is shown in that
demonstration of solidarity. On the cross of Jesus God entered fully into all
of the pain and grief of human life and even into death itself. That cross
shows that God did not, and does not, scorn our suffering and death. God does
not stand aloof from them. Rather God enters into them, takes them into God’s
own being, sanctifies them, suffers through them with us, and, as the
Resurrection shows, leads us out again always into new life. The abyss that we
perceive separating us from God does not, from God’s perspective, exist. No
such abyss ever did. Our fear of death does not create one. At the risk of
sounding, indeed being, heretical, I would say that Christ’s death did not
change anything foundational in the Divine-human relationship. Rather, it made
the nature of that relationship manifest in the most vivid way. Christ died for
us because in his death we can learn, as we can nowhere else, how much God
loves us. God loves us so much that God shares all of human life with us, even
suffering and death. God loves us whether we take that lesson from the
Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus or not.
To
state the point in terms directly relevant to the modern existential dilemma,
on the cross God demonstrated in the fullest possible way that God is not
alienated from us. Therein lies our salvation. God is with us in profound
solidarity throughout our lives, in our deaths, and beyond our deaths. And
because God is not alienated from us, we need not be alienated from God.
Because God is always present in profound solidarity with us, we can know God
as an intimate reality in our lives. We can know the saving significance of
Christ just as the earliest Christians did. This knowledge is not a cognitive
matter only, although I do not slight the role of the mind in bringing us to such
knowledge. It does not depend on our ability to explain it. Knowledge of God as
a reality in our lives is an action of our entire personality. It is loving God
with all of our being and knowing God in hour hearts, minds, bodies, and souls.
At its most intense it is a mystical union with God. Such knowledge does not
come easily to us. Our alienation is not that superficial. Most of never attain
it fully. Nonetheless, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ make such
knowledge possible.
When
we have this knowledge all of our existential angst disappears. We become
grounded. We lose our fear of death. We are no longer lonely because we know
that Christ is with us at all times and in all places. We find meaning in our
lives as the beloved of God. Because we know that God loves us we can love one
another and overcome our alienation from one another. Because we know that God
loves us we can love even ourselves, which means that we are freed to become
the whole people God intends us to be. We can overcome our alienation from our
true selves.
Christ
did indeed die for us. He died so that we might overcome our existential
dilemma of alienation. He died that we might be freed from alienation into the
full, complete life that God wants for every one of us. Satan does not rule us,
therefore Christ’s death did not free us from Satan. God is not a cosmic child
abuser whose honor we have so offended that only the slaughter of the Innocent
One could satisfy God’s bloodlust. In the cross of Christ God did demonstrate
God’s love for us as Abelard said, but there is more involved than our
acknowledging God’s love with our minds only. On the cross God did nothing less
than give us the means of overcoming our existential alienation by
demonstrating in the fullest measure God’s solidarity with us in life, in
death, and beyond death. Thanks be to God!
